Hit the road, Elon Musk—undergrads are engineering tomorrow’s medical marvels in between midterms.
On August 26, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and education nonprofit VentureWell highlighted medical devices invented by undergraduate students as part of the 13th annual Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) Challenge. The teams received about $160,000 total in prizes.
Eleven designs won and five received honorable mentions out of 85 submissions. In addition to awards from NIH, partners like the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research (NICHD) doled out honors as well, such as the NICHD’s Rehabilitative and Assistive Technologies prize.
If you, like us, are curious to know what college students are capable of when they’re not testing whether dish soap doubles as laundry detergent, here are some of the winners:
UroFlo. The top award was the $20,000 Steven H. Krosnick Prize that went to a team from Houston-based Rice University. The students invented a bladder irrigation system that automatically adjusts its own flow rate, tracks blood in urine, and alerts medical professionals to potential issues via an online database.
Healthcare workers currently monitor blood in bladder irrigation systems by sight, the team explained in a YouTube video, an intensive and imprecise method that burdens workers and increases risks of mistakes. As the group of now-graduates said, with UroFlo, “Urine good hands.”
Octave. University of California, Riverside, students got second place and a cool $15,000 for inventing an optical coherence tomography and vibrometry endoscope. The imaging probe helps diagnose people with conductive hearing loss, which occurs in the outer or middle ear. There are “severe limitations” in traditional imaging, which, unlike this device, often can’t capture a high-quality image of the middle ear, one of the inventors said in an accompanying video.
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NanoLIST. Ithaca, New York-based Cornell University undergrads invented a rapid test kit that detects when someone’s saliva sample has an elevated level of lead, which the team envisioned as an alternative to blood testing in areas with evidence of high lead levels. The test won the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities Healthcare Technologies for Low-Resource Settings Prize of $15,000.
ColoTech. The NCI awarded $15,000 to a group of Palo Alto, California-based Stanford University students who invented a pill alternative to colonoscopies. The drug is designed to emit a signal that’s detectable through a spectrophotometer if it comes into contact with precancerous or cancerous tissue.
The students said in an accompanying presentation that they’re in the process of refining the tech and continuing in vitro testing, with the goal of eventually testing with in vivo models.
U-Build Bionic Knee. Salt Lake City-based University of Utah students received the $15,000 NICHD National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research Prize for their 3D-printed bionic knee. Using technology that allows for more mobility than usual prosthetics for lower limbs, the goal is to make it easier to do things like take a hiking trip or walk up stairs.